6. The world war that began in 1914 was a result of the explosion of the contradiction of capitalism between the nation-state system and the world economy. This war, waged for the imperialist redivision of the world, especially the colonies and semi-colonies which at that time constituted most of the earth’s surface, was at the same time a declaration of the opening of the epoch of proletarian revolution.

7. The fact that almost all the parties of the Second International, which led the social democratic workers’ movement, sided with their “own” bourgeois states by voting in favor of war credits represented a historic betrayal of the international working class and of socialism.

8. This betrayal proved the importance of Lenin’s protracted struggle against opportunism. The collapse of the Second International through social chauvinism and defensism could not be explained by the betrayal of individual leaders. On the contrary, the objective processes that led to the war also led to the degeneration of the upper stratum within the workers’ movement. The plunder of resources in the colonies by the imperialist powers created the material basis for the growth of a workers’ aristocracy, which provided the social basis for opportunism.

9. The Bolshevik Party under Lenin’s leadership condemned this betrayal and continued to defend the program of world socialist revolution against the imperialist war, which played a decisive role in ensuring the continuity of the international Marxist movement. Without this historic struggle, the October Revolution in 1917 and the founding of the Third (Communist) International in 1919 would not have been possible.

10. Between 1914 and 1917 Lenin and Trotsky foresaw that the imperialist war would set the stage for revolutionary eruptions in Europe. This perspective was vindicated with the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917, which arose out of the war and its extreme exacerbation of the crisis of Russian society. After the February Revolution overthrew the Tsar, the Mensheviks sided with the bourgeois Provisional Government and opposed a revolution of the working class. The Provisional Government defended capitalist property relations, continued to prosecute the war, and opposed the distribution of land to the peasantry. Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917 and, superseding in practice the longstanding Bolshevik program of the democratic dictatorship, called for the working class to oppose the Provisional Government and take power through the Soviets. This position validated and endorsed, in all essentials, Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, which had, to an extraordinary degree, anticipated the actual course of revolutionary developments and laid the foundations, theoretically and politically, for Lenin’s decisive reorientation of the Bolshevik Party in April 1917. Lenin’s adoption of Trotsky’s perspective was bitterly opposed by many “Old Bolsheviks,” including Stalin. Prior to Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917, the position taken by Stalin, as one of the editors of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper, was that critical support should be given to the Provisional Government. He also advocated support for the continuation of the war effort.

11. The seizure of power by the Russian working class under the leadership of the Bolsheviks in October 1917 was a tremendous confirmation of the theory of socialist consciousness developed by Lenin and carried forward by Trotsky in the following years. Socialist consciousness, which requires a scientific understanding of historical development and the laws of capitalism, could not develop spontaneously within the working class. The main task of the Marxist movement was to develop socialist consciousness in the working class and make it conscious of its historical tasks. As Lenin explained:

The highest task of humanity is to comprehend this objective logic of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features, so that it may be possible to adapt to it one’s social consciousness and the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical a fashion as possible.[1]

12. The guiding perspective of the Russian Revolution in October 1917 was Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. Trotsky drew on the lessons of the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, in which the working class had played the leading role against Tsarism. Hitherto, the parties of the Second International had viewed revolutions as national events, with their outcome determined by internal socio-economic factors. They assumed that the socialist revolution would begin in the most advanced European countries, whereas less developed countries such as Russia would necessarily pass through an extended period of capitalist economic and bourgeois-democratic political development prior to the socialist revolution. The task of Marxist parties, therefore, would be to support and encourage a revolutionary struggle for the establishment of a democratic republic, led by the national bourgeoisie.

13. The 1905 revolution demonstrated the inability of the bourgeoisie to fulfill such a role. It had been integrated within, and was essentially subservient to, a global economic order dominated by the major powers. It was constrained by its hostility to the proletariat, which had emerged as the most dynamic class within Russian society due to the penetration of capital into the major cities. In opposition to the Mensheviks, Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued that the political weakness of the bourgeoisie meant that the revolution would be led by the working class, in alliance with the rural masses, and would establish a “democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry.” Lenin’s formulation imparted to the democratic revolution a radical character, implying the destruction of all remnants of feudal relations and an end to autocratic rule. But it did not define concretely the social character of either the revolution or the state it would create.

14. Trotsky’s own appraisal of the nature and tasks of the revolutionary movement marked his emergence as the foremost strategist, not merely of the Russian, but of the world socialist revolution. He insisted that the character of the revolution in Russia would be determined by international rather than national conditions. The immediate tasks that confronted the Russian masses were of a bourgeois-democratic character, but they could not be realised under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie, or within a bourgeois republic. Having taken power, the working class would be forced to carry out measures of a socialist character. To those who argued that socialist goals could not be realised within economically backward Russia, he countered that they would be made possible by the extension of the revolution onto the European and, ultimately, world arena:

Binding all countries together with its mode of production and commerce, capitalism has converted the whole world into a single economic and political organism… This immediately gives the events now unfolding an international character and opens up a wide horizon. The political emancipation of Russia led by the working class will raise that class to a height as yet unknown in history, will transfer to it colossal power and resources, and will make it the initiator of the liquidation of world capitalism, for which history has created all the objective conditions.[2]

15. The October Revolution, which vindicated the Theory of Permanent Revolution and was considered by the Bolsheviks to be the opening shot of the world socialist revolution, provided an impetus for upheavals around the world. The revolutionary government called for an end to the war, revealed secret agreements that exposed the imperialist plans of the parties to the war, and encouraged the workers to rise up against their own governments and the masses in the colonies against the colonialists. The Sykes-Picot agreement, which set the terms for the secret partition of part of the territory of the Ottoman Empire between Britain, France and Russia, was made public in November 1917 by Leon Trotsky, then People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Soviet Russia.